Amol Rajan: It’s good to be green - especially if you’re a Tory

We have come a long way from the post-election boast that this would be 'the greenest government ever'

Tuesday 26 March 2013 11:29 BST

P1 George Osborne Budget day Pic: Alex Lentati Alex Lentati

Of all the interest groups left numb by George Osborne’s Budget, few have as much reason to feel despondent as the green lobby. The environmental measures announced last week were pitiful. The Chancellor mentioned tax breaks to encourage shale gas development and said he wanted a low-carbon economy to create jobs but didn’t explain how. There was mention of support for low-emission vehicles but as Green Party MP Caroline Lucas put it, there was “not a single word about renewables”.

We have, in other words, come a long way from the post-election boast that this would be “the greenest government ever”. There are three main reasons for this. First, the loss of Chris Huhne, a first-class Environment Secretary. Second, the green agenda is increasingly seen as unaffordable. And third, it has become fashionable to associate environmentalism with the bien-pensant Left. These are, in order: regrettable, stupid and myopic.

We know that the industries of the future are based on research and technology, and that our addiction to oil funds tyranny, in the Middle East especially. Investing more heavily in green jobs could both equip Britain for this century’s much vaunted global race and suffocate despotism: two noble goals. But what most interests me is the curious idea that environmentalism is somehow antithetical to the conservative disposition. On the contrary, it is the truest expression of it.

Since the French Revolution, one way of distinguishing between Left and Right was that the former thought the limits to human flourishing were mostly social, whereas the latter thought they were mostly natural.

In the second half of the 20th century, the Left crossed this political fence. It happened, I think, in response to the success of global capitalism. Seeing how large corporations ransacked the earth for private profit, the Left decided anti-capitalism was synonymous with being green. Lately, much of the Left has adopted Malthusian warnings of over-population to consolidate its new misanthropic credentials.

Yet an abiding irony of our politics is that environmentalism used to be the preserve of the aristocracy. Britain’s green movement began in the upper classes’ disdain for the Industrial Revolution, with its encroachment on inherited land by the urban masses. Charles Windsor, with his unforgivable opposition to genetic modification, is a keeper of this tradition.

Conservatism is a project of social ecology, whose semantic link with conservation is explicit. Both habits share, as Roger Scruton puts it, the aim of husbanding resources: in the former case, love; in the latter, land. The true conservative sees his relationship with the Earth not as one of ownership and exploitation but temporary custodianship. Our planet, being both our inheritance and our legacy, is a conservative cause, a gift that secures the contract between the living, the dead and the unborn. So steward it.

When, early in his reign as Tory leader, David Cameron made a green tree his party’s logo, he was derided as a PR merchant. In fact, he was returning his party to its roots. I am not an environmentalist, still less a conservative; but in the Coalition’s lethargy on green matters there is something worse than a departure from its founding Agreement, and a despoiling of our industrial future: a betrayal of conservatism itself.